‘Customizing His Own Path’ with Ibrahim Moustafa

Shelf Conscious is back from the dead! To resurrect the show, Keith sits down with one of his favorite YouTube creators and collectors, Ibrahim Moustafa — a world-renowned comic book artist whose graphic novel RetroActive is currently in development at Hulu, and who you may also recognize from a recent stop on the Middle Geeks podcast.

Ibrahim opens up about how customizing action figures became his way around an industry with no path cutters for people like him — as one of the only North African creators in mainstream comics, he built his own audience on YouTube (starting with the custom Batmobile video that put him on the map) rather than wait for an opportunity that wasn’t coming. From there, the conversation goes deep into the craft: why he works almost exclusively in 1/12 scale, what McFarlane, Mafex, Hot Toys, and InArt each get right and wrong, and how he handles the internet’s more, uh, passionate opinions about a plastic Batmobile’s paint job. They also get into representation on both sides of his career — from Marvel and DC’s “exceptional minority” problem to why he wrote an unmistakably Egyptian American lead into RetroActive before Hollywood ever came calling.

All this and more, only on Shelf Conscious, where we always come collect!

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Shelf Conscious is a podcast all about the world of toy collecting. Join host Keith Chow as he discusses action figures with fellow collectors and industry professionals. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube!